Explore

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Poetry Writing Prompt #17 - Bringing a Place to Life Via Your Poem

In Rainer Rilke’s “Diaries of a Young Poet” (not his more often sited “Letters”)
he was making careful notes to his lady love, describing his travels as he
ventured into Italy.

Please note Rilke's technique:

1. He considered his audience: he is writing
especially for an audience of one. A woman he is in love with who highly values
the words he is writing. She is hungry for rich, ripe narrative.

2. Consider his writing voice. Can you hear his voice and his
heartbeat as he writes for his
“audience of one? Keep your voice authentic no matter how large – or intimate
– your “audience.”

3. Consider the overall metaphor. What does it speak to of these two
cities? How does Rilke make these places feel like people?

The Words of Rilke:

“Florence, unlike Venice, does not disclose herself to the casual
passer-by. In Venice the bright, cheerful palaces are so trusting and
talkative, and they linger like beautiful women forever by the mirror of the
canal, wondering whether people ever see the aging in them. They are happy in
their brilliance and have probably never desired anything other than to be
beautiful and to display and enjoy all the advantages of this possession. Therefore, even the
most fleeting person goes away from them enriched, richer at least by the festive fronts and
their incomparable golden smile, which at every hour of the day remains awake in one nuance or
another, and at night gives way to that almost over sweet, surrendering melancholy
that has found a place in the Venetian memories of even the hastiest traveler
through Italy.

"Not so in Florence: the palaces raise their mute foreheads toward the
stranger in almost hostile
fashion, and a wary defiance lingers around the niches and gates, and even the
brightest sun does
not succeed in dispelling its last traces. It is a strange sensation,
especially amid the open life
of the modern streets where the people celebrate their festivals and shout
their business, this dense fortified suspiciousness of the old bourgeois palaces,
of the broad gigantic bourgeous arches with their eternal somberness embedded
fossil-like in the folds of the mighty ashlars."

Do you see how he makes these places into characters?

Poetry Writing Prompt: Consider a place you feel strong feelings about,
whether you can’t stand the place or love the place deeply. Jot some notes
about those distinctive characteristics you love or dislike and make them come
alive as characters or as intriguing backdrops for your poem.

Your task is simply this: bring this place to life via your poem.

Word Prompt: Name of the Place of Your Poem

Sentence Prompt: “Name of place does” or “Name of place doesn’t”

As always, use these as possible leaping off points. If your writing moves
in a completely different direction, be grateful! I am pleased when I see any of
your poems posted, even if I don’t comment right away.

Also, please don’t feel there are any “hafta’s” or “gotta’s” attached with
OctPoWriMo. We would rather you write sometimes than no times. We understand
busy lives: there are no rights, no wrongs, no “only this way or that.”